Newsletter: The Radical Center

(April 15, 2019) Partisan debate assumes that policy must be either/or. Take your pick: either we address climate change or we have a healthy economy. But it’s not hard to envision a centrist platform that does both. Washington is a giant pile of obsolete, ineffective, and wasteful programs. Vast public resources would be released by pushing the reset button and rebuilding ossified bureaucracies.

An added benefit: alienated voters would likely flock to a platform which promised to replace red tape with simpler frameworks, liberating Americans and localities to meet public goals in their own ways.

The key to this kingdom is a complete overhaul of Washington. Americans want it. But Washington doesn’t.

The first step is to build support for a new governing vision which revives core American principles that have been lost. Here is Philip’s column defining a radical centrist platform, and another column explaining why neither party, as currently organized, will champion these reforms.

In his annual letter, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon cited our infrastructure studies: “Philip K. Howard, who does some of the best academic work on America’s infrastructure, estimates it would cost $4 trillion to fix our aging infrastructure — and this is less than it would cost not to fix it.”

Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang has embraced several Common Good proposals, including sunsetting old laws, overhauling civil service, and relocating federal agencies.

Former Pitney Bowes CEO Michael Critelli argued in The Hill for the need to give officials the authority to make practical choices and hold them accountable for results, citing Try Common Sense.